‘The Musicians Who Only Play and Sing for the Drowning’ is a body of work that I have been developing since July 2018, when I moved into our new studio in Castlemount Victoria Place Axminster.
This body of work was primarily created for the Exhibition ‘Marking Injustice- A painters way of Coping’ at the Alsop gallery at Bridport Arts Center in 2015 ‘Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England’.
Amnesty 2007 exhibition. World Refugee day. ‘Nurturing Hope Seeking Common Ground’.
In this file photographs and Images from the exhibition ‘Marking Injustice’-A Painters Way of Coping, Running from 17th April until 30th May 2015 at Bridport Arts Centre.
I would like my work to stand as a lasting declaration of my abhorrence towards torture and brutality, and for the act of buying my work to be a gesture of solidarity.
I became concerned with the plight of asylum seekers and refugees when the tabloid press took up the issue and began to deliberately and regularly inflate the tension surrounding the subject of immigration and confuse the distinction between asylum seekers and migrant workers. I felt my sympathies being drawn to both groups for different reasons.
The bonds between human beings can be directly associated with lineage and ancestry or they can be more widely linked to the kinship of shared ideologies.
The news media plays an important role in informing us about significant human rights issues. I represent this in my work by using the motif of film strips.
This work attempts to develop the symbolic resonance of the filmstrip. It is used in a metaphorical way to represent the passing of time, and the suspension of events in time.
The necessary and desperate act of stowing away de-humanises and degrades each individual and yet this ‘human freight’ retains an element of dignity and courage that depicts the many life histories that bring people to this point of desperation.
Ricky Roman’s route to creativity was a path cut through the forest of his own life rather than the more conventional road of formal education. The thicket of his experience is full of contradictions.
My sketchbooks often reveal how my ideas and pre-occupations are intrinsic to my mark-making. New thoughts interplay with old obsessions, thus creating dynamic challenges during the process of composition for larger work.